Facebook blames server slipup for longest outage in its history

Facebook’s daylong outage has finally ended. The troubles first hit the social network — which has more than 2 billion users around the world — around 9 a.m. PT Wednesday, according to outage tracking site Downdetector. At this point on Thursday, more than 24 hours later, users have by and large regained full access. On Thursday, Facebook blamed the problem on “a server configuration change,” saying that it had resolved the issues and that “our systems are recovering.” Instagram was also down for many hours, starting at around the same time. However, Instagram’s official Twitter account announced the platform was back in action at 9:41 p.m. PT time on Wednesday. Users throughout the day Wednesday posted on Twitter that they were seeing a message saying Facebook was “down for maintenance.” Other users trying to post status updates on Facebook, including CNET staff, got error messages saying “something went wrong.” The outage mainly affected users in the US and Europe but also hit parts of South America, Australia and Asia, according to a map by Downdetector. Users of Facebook-owned WhatsApp also reported they were having trouble sending photos on the app. Virtual reality company Oculus, also owned by Facebook, reported that its users, too, were having trouble accessing and using the platform. Now playing: Watch this: Where were you when Facebook went down? 1:42 While Facebook has experienced lengthy outages in the past, downtime like this is unusual among the world’s largest tech companies. Downdetector received about 7.5 million reports from Facebook, WhatsApp and… [Read full story]